The improvising pianist Cecil Taylor, a pioneering, influential and highly experimental musician and a longtime Brooklyn resident, is one of this year’s recipients of the Kyoto Prize, awarded each year by the Inamori Foundation in Japan, the foundation announced on Friday. Mr. Taylor, 84, is this year’s laureate in the category of arts and philosophy; different fields across technology, science, art and philosophy are considered on a rotating basis, and there has been a recipient in music every four years. (The last musician laureate in 2009 was the conductor and composer Pierre Boulez.) The prize comes with a cash gift of 50 million yen (approximately $510,000), to be given at a ceremony in Kyoto in November. This year’s other laureates are the electronics engineer Dr. Robert H. Dennard and the evolutionary biologist Dr. Masatoshi Nei.
Live (solo), Germany (Berlin), 1991 (The Tree of Life)
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lagniappe
musical thoughts: following yesterday’s post
With live music, you’ve got to be ready when it is. Last night, after looking forward to an evening of Ethiopian dance, of saxophones and drums, at the Hideout, I just wasn’t in the mood. Instead I listened, in my living room, to something else—Bach’s Sonata No. 1 in G minor for solo violin, played by Nathan Milstein. On another night that would have seemed as foreign to me as this kinetic dance music did last night. But we can only hear with the ears we’ve got, which, like the rest of us, are ever changing, often in ways we neither anticipate nor understand.
Speaking of Bach, last night, as I was working on the closing argument I’ll be giving today in a federal bribery-conspiracy trial, it was a great joy—and a great comfort—to be able to listen to this.
Johann Sebastian Bach, The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book I;Andrei Gavrilov (piano), playing and talking (Preludes & Fugues Nos. 1-12); Joanna MacGregor (piano), playing and talking (Preludes & Fugues Nos. 13-24); TV (BBC), 2000
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lagniappe
reading table
[L]istening to music for an hour or two every evening doesn’t deprive me of the silence—the music is the silence coming true.
1. No day that includes a Bach cello suite can be all bad.
2. Any day can include a Bach cello suite.
3. Therefore a day that’s all bad can always be avoided.
Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750), Suite No. 1 in G major for Unaccompanied Cello; Pablo Casals (1876-1973), live, France (Abbey of Saint-Michel-de-Cuxa), 1954
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lagniappe
reading table
[T]here really is no bottom to what is not known. The truth about us is endless. As are the lies.
Janos Starker, cellist, July 5, 1924-April 28, 2013
Today, remembering him, we revisit an early post.
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I first heard this music—Bach’s Six Suites for Unaccompanied Cello—nearly 40 years ago. At the local public library where I was going to college, I happened upon some recordings—a boxed set of three LPs on the Mercury label—by Janos Starker, which I proceeded to check out over and over again. In the years since, first on my turntable and then my CD player, a lot of music has come and gone. These pieces have remained.
Johann Sebastian Bach, Suite No. 3 in C Major for Unaccompanied Cello
Janos Starker, live, Tokyo, 1988
Janos Starker, one of the 20th century’s most renowned cellists, whose restrained onstage elegance was amply matched by the cyclone of Scotch, cigarettes and opinion that animated his offstage life, died on Sunday at a hospice in Bloomington, Ind. He was 88.
Indiana University, where he was a distinguished professor of music, announced his death.
A Hungarian-born child prodigy who later survived internment by the Nazis during World War II, Mr. Starker appeared, in the decades after the war, on the world’s most prestigious recital stages and as a soloist with the world’s leading orchestras. He was part of a vaunted triumvirate that included Gregor Piatigorsky (1903-76) and Mstislav Rostropovich (1927-2007), collectively the most celebrated cellists of the day.
He was also widely known through his more than 150 recordings, including one of Bach’s six suites for solo cello for which he won a Grammy Award in 1998.
Mr. Starker played several magnificent cellos during his career — including the “Lord Aylesford” Stradivarius of 1696, a 1707 Guarnerius and a 1705 instrument by the great Venetian maker Matteo Goffriller — but he nonetheless managed to resist the seductions of the instrument to which cellists can fall prey.
The chief hallmark of his playing was a conspicuous lack of schmaltz. Effusive sentiment is an inherent risk of the cello, with its thundering sonorities and timbre so like the human voice. He also shunned the dramatic head tossing and body swaying to which many cellists incline.
“I’m not an actor,” he said in a 1996 interview with the Internet Cello Society, an online fraternity of cellists and devotees. He added, with characteristic candor, “I don’t want to be one of those musicians who appears to be making love to himself onstage.”
Unlike many acclaimed string players, Mr. Starker used a lean, judicious vibrato — the minute, rapid variations in pitch by the left hand that can enrich a note’s sound but can also border on the histrionic. Excessive vibrato, he said, was like “a woman smearing her whole face with lipstick.”
While the musical style that resulted was too dispassionate for some critics’ taste, others praised Mr. Starker’s faultless technique; purity of tone; clean, polished phrasing; and acute concern with the composer’s intent. His style was especially well suited to the Bach suites, canonical texts for the instrument, which he recorded on several occasions.
“The technical aspects of Mr. Starker’s playing are so wholly merged in the solution to problems of interpretation and style that the listener tends to forget how much technical mastery the cellist has achieved,” Raymond Ericson wrote in The New York Times in 1962, reviewing a recital at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. “The pitch is unerringly right, the tone is mellow without being mushy, difficult leaps and runs are manipulated with the easy unobtrusiveness of a magician.”
William Ferguson, “The Music They Made,” New York Times (12/27/12):Etta James, Dave Brubeck, Davy Jones, Levon Helm, Donna Summer, Chuck Brown, Ed Cassidy, Greg Ham, Jimmy Castor, Ravi Shankar, Earl Scruggs, Doc Watson, Ronnie Montrose, Jon Lord, Michael Davis, Joe South, Chavela Vargas, Duck Dunn, Johnny Otis, Whitney Houston, Jimmy Ellis, Adam Yauch, Mickey Baker, Bill Doss, Ketty Wells, Bob Babbitt, Robin Gibb, Andy Williams, Terry Callier
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lagniappe
musical thoughts
To love anything—music, literature, comedy, sports, whatever—is to be perpetually saying goodbye.
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reading table
clamoring geese—
over there is the year
ending too?
—Kobayashi Issa, 1763-1827 (translated from Japanese by David G. Lanoue)
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found words
FASTEN SEATBELT WHILE SEATED
USE BOTTOM CUSHION FOR FLOTATION
—Saturday morning, on a flight from Chicago to a family gathering in Lincoln, Nebraska, this was on the back of the seat in front of me
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random thoughts
Some things are better left unexamined. Like, for instance, flying on a commercial airplane. If I thought much about it, I’d never do it.
These pieces—Bach’s cello suites—I’ve been listening to for over 40 years. I never tire of them. Never.
Johann Sebastian Bach, Suite No. 5 in C minor for Unaccompanied Cello, excerpt (Sarabande); Mischa Maisky, cello
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lagniappe
radio
WKCR-FM’s Bach Festival—one of my favorite musical events of the year—begins tonight at 9 p.m. (EST). It runs, continuously, until midnight New Year’s Eve. That a world so full of so much junk has room in it for this, too, amazes me.
Charles Rosen, pianist, teacher, writer (1972 National Book Award for Nonfiction: The Classical Style), May 5, 1927-December 9, 2012
Frederic Chopin, Nocturne in B major (Op. 62, No. 1)
Live, Atlanta, 1985
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Johann Sebastian Bach, The Art of the Fugue, excerpts
Recording, 1967
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lagniappe
musical thoughts
A German pre-Romantic philosopher, Johann Georg Hamann, held that the sense of music was given to man to make it possible to measure time. The composer Elliott Carter’s fame comes partly from a reconception of time in music that fits the world of today (although there are many other aspects of his music to enjoy). We do not measure time regularly, like clocks do, but with many differing rates of speed. In the complexity of today’s experience, it often seems as if simultaneous events were unfolding with different measures. These different measures coexist and often blend but are not always rationalized in experience under one central system. We might call this a system of irreconcilable regularities.
In Carter’s music, things happen for different instruments at different tempos—none of them dominates the others, and an idiosyncratic character is often given to the different instruments that preserves their individuality. Carter is never dogmatic, and the different measures of time may occasionally combine briefly for a moment of synthesis. The individuality of tempo and rhythm can make his music difficult to perform as each player unconsciously responds physically to the different rhythms he or she hears and yet tries to preserve his or her own system intact. Carter is, for this reason, best interpreted by those musicians who have often played his scores. Just as, in a polyphonic work of Bach or any other competent and genial contrapuntist, one takes pleasure in the independent line and interest of the separate voices and rejoices in the way they illuminate each other, so in Carter we can often delight in a quick foreground movement heard against a mysteriously shifting background that gives the foreground a new sense.
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[T]he sense of his music is dependent as much upon tone color and dynamics as it is on pitch; the more salient aspects of the individual instrumental lines have always to be brought out.
Last Sunday I had one of the great musical afternoons—one of the great afternoons, period—of my life, listening, at Chicago’s Symphony Center (across from the Art Institute), to pianist Andras Schiff play Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, Book II, in its entirety (and entirely from memory), a performance that lasted nearly three hours and could’ve kept going, as far as I was concerned, for three days.
Johann Sebastian Bach, The Well-Tempered Clavier (1722 [Book I], 1742 [Book II])
Book II, Prelude and Fugue No. 16 in G minor, BMV 885
Sheng Cai (piano), live, Boston, 2010
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Books I and II, Sviatoslav Richter (piano), recording, 1970s
(For better sound quality on this and other YouTube clips, go to the “Settings” icon [lower right] and select the highest available [here 1080p].)
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lagniappe
musical thoughts
If there is anyone who owes everything to Bach, it is God. Without Bach, God would be a third-rate character.
music clip of the day 